I used to have fairly regular bouts of depression. I’ve had them since I was a teenager. I finally figured out the source. I go through spells of very high energy, where I get a tremendous amount of work done (I wrote the script for this message board from scratch, as well as the scripts for several other sites, RadioJesus.com, Mastering Life Ministries Online Shop, LookListenLearn.org, as well as others) I would get alot accomplished and feel really great. Then I’d go through a spell of low energy where I couldn’t seem to get motivated to do much. At the end of each day I’d be depressed because compared to my high energy days, I hadn’t accomplished hardly anything. Then one day I was reading Louis L’amour’s autobiography and he was describing a job he had digging holes for the pylons for a bridge. He and another guy would whip out a dozen or so holes while the rest of the crew could barely finish 2 or 3. One thing they did was work furiously for awhile, then take a break to rest, then get back at their work. One day the supervisor was sick and the replacement saw them resting, and went out and chewed them out and fired them. L’amour and his buddy knew they could find a job very easily and that the replacement supervisor probably couldn’t after the construction failed to meet deadline because of his stupidity. They laughed as they gathered their gear and left, knowing what faced the guy that’d fired them.

That story struck a note because my method of work seemed to be like that, spells of extreme productivity followed by spells of low productivity. Considering everything together my overall productivity is extremely high, so being depressed because one part of a cycle is less productive didn’t make sense. If I looked at my work as a whole, I could be proud of what I did. So now when the low production times come, I relax, enjoy it, don’t feel guilty or depressed, and anticipate the coming productivity.

I’ve since learned that this may be what’s called manic/depressive, but in a very mild form, or maybe not. The bottom line is depression is a person’s reaction to stimuli, whether that stimuli is circumstances of hormones, the reaction is still under the control of the person.

A few weeks ago the doctor put me on Prednisone, and almost immediately I found myself extremely grouchy about almost everything. My first reaction, of course, was to wonder why everyone in the world was doing their best to try to tick me off. Then it occurred to me that Prednisone is extremely similar to Cortef and Dexamethazone, and we’ve discussed on this board for years now the inevitable moodiness these seem to bring. Once I realized my grouchiness was of hormonal origin, it seemed to almost completely vanish, like a shadow would if you shined a flashlight into it to get a better look at it. When I approached a situation where I knew I might over respond, I paused, collected myself, and repeated to myself, "only say something nice, only say something nice" It seemed to work, and I got through the medication without killing anyone, or worse, telling them off. Ok, Ok, I wouldn’t have really killed anyone, except . . . well . . . maybe . . . anyway, I got through it. The point is depression isn’t what chemicals, hormones or circumstances do to you, it’s how you choose to respond to what they do to you. It’s still your choice. You’re in the driver’s seat.